Team ups in fiction - hot or not?
I was chatting with my brother yesterday about the clichés that often come up in fiction. One of his biggest pet peeves appears to be the classic pairing of the main male and female characters in most thrillers and adventure novels. Not that he has a problem with male/female team ups. It's actually that he finds it tiresome, almost irritating, to be reading a book and get to the point of introducing the main female character (who more often than not will be partnered up with or otherwise forced into working with the main male character - or vice versa) only to find that she is, of course, attractive.
We argued the point, with me not having a problem with it based on the nature of the business female protagonists find themselves working in most action thrillers requiring a high level of fitness thereby making it perfectly plausible that they would have athletic physiques. But he pointed out that this doesn't mean they automatically have to have the face of a covergirl as well.
Personally I don't think this should hurt sales of a book, or the reader's enjoyment. But I suppose it can be a bit of a cliché, and therefore I wondered what the voices out there think? There are exceptions to the need/expectation of an attractive female partner/leader: in books that have small town medical examiners for instance, there might not be a need for her to be a smouldering 35 year old who doesn't realise she's smouldering. And even in the case of the "brilliant" linguists, criminal psychologists, and archaeologists who might not technically need to have military training or spend half their lives dodging gunfire, do we really need them to be hot as hell?
So if you've found me and want to weigh in, please: Is it a bad thing to have your primary female characters in an action adventure/thriller novel be attractive, even if there is no intention to have your primary male character end up with her? Or, despite it's clichéd status, is it something you enjoy in your escapism, and expect as much as you expect partnerships on TV to generally have to good looking people play them?
We argued the point, with me not having a problem with it based on the nature of the business female protagonists find themselves working in most action thrillers requiring a high level of fitness thereby making it perfectly plausible that they would have athletic physiques. But he pointed out that this doesn't mean they automatically have to have the face of a covergirl as well.
Personally I don't think this should hurt sales of a book, or the reader's enjoyment. But I suppose it can be a bit of a cliché, and therefore I wondered what the voices out there think? There are exceptions to the need/expectation of an attractive female partner/leader: in books that have small town medical examiners for instance, there might not be a need for her to be a smouldering 35 year old who doesn't realise she's smouldering. And even in the case of the "brilliant" linguists, criminal psychologists, and archaeologists who might not technically need to have military training or spend half their lives dodging gunfire, do we really need them to be hot as hell?
So if you've found me and want to weigh in, please: Is it a bad thing to have your primary female characters in an action adventure/thriller novel be attractive, even if there is no intention to have your primary male character end up with her? Or, despite it's clichéd status, is it something you enjoy in your escapism, and expect as much as you expect partnerships on TV to generally have to good looking people play them?
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